George Chestertonhttp://www.newstatesman.com/writers/george_chesterton
enhttp://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/06/cut-price-popster-or-noble-sentamentalist-beginners-guide-burt-bacharach
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Burt Bacharach’s songs have an inconvenient habit of catching even the most committed cynic unawares and leaving them – about three minutes later – blubbing like the mother of the bride. How does he do it?</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/144043594.jpg?itok=8ifW-7IF" width="510" height="348" alt="Burt Bacharach." title="Burt Bacharach." /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Burt Bacharach after receiving the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2012. Photo: Kris Connor/Getty Images.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p> <em>Another</em><em> Tear Falls</em>. Burt Bacharach’s songs have an inconvenient habit of catching even the most committed cynic unawares and leaving them – about three minutes later – blubbing like the mother of the bride. How does he do this? If there was ever a body of work to which Noel Coward’s withering “extraordinary how potent cheap music is” seemed to apply, it is that of Burt Bacharach. But sentimentality, and the sentimental in art, is not merely matter of cut-price emotional simulation. At its best, what Bacharach does belongs to a more noble tradition.</p>
<p>Sentimentality used to denote emotional awareness and sensitivity until the word became associated with the mawkish. The ugly side of sentimentality is a self-deception, individual and collective, caused by anxiety and a longing for conformity. Oscar Wilde called a sentimentalist “one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it”, which now sounds as much a prophesy of our culture as a biting <em>fin de siècle</em> observation.</p>
<p>Bacharach’s songs – stretching back to his earliest hits in 1957 – exist on the surface tension of sentimentality, as if the merest misjudgment would see them lose their footing and drown. But what is so unnerving about listening to Bacharach is that while you are consistently moved by his music you are also wholly conscious of its emotional triggers, to the point where it feels like you are being manipulated, even fooled. Perhaps he is so good he can make you question the nature of reality.</p>
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<p>Emotions may be pushed and pulled by social convention but they are not inorganic. This music is akin to the scene in <em>Casablanca</em> when Captain Renault says to Rick: “As I suspected, you are a rank sentimentalist.” The line plays with the ironic gap between the audience’s prejudice about sentimentality and Rick’s selfless, brave and sincere actions. Sometimes soft sentiment can harden into an almost palpable truth. This is what happens with Bacharach.</p>
<p>His output, incorporating the lyrics of his great partner Hal David, used to be measured against rock or more modish pop, with the implication that it was something pejoratively mainstream. Thankfully, this is less common now. (The irony is that as popular culture becomes less and less “rebellious” – as the word was understood by generations of post-war teenagers – so the idea of a well-groomed, well-tailored artist like Bacharach becomes more and more fashionable.) But he and David were certainly operating within a tradition of unashamedly commercial creativity and their links to an artisanal songwriting lineage can still lead to lazy assumptions about the depth and breadth of their work.</p>
<p>What defines this music is the marriage of Bacharach’s bold romantic sensibility to David’s knack of condensing complex ideas into laconic everyday poetry. It is not melodramatic. It is, in fact, truly unorthodox against the standards by which it is judged. Critics may call it easy listening, but it is not easy playing (or singing).</p>
<p>Bacharach and David’s best songs, written between 1963-69, fall into two main categories. (I am excluding the enjoyable but somewhat silly knockabouts such as <em>What’s New Pussycat.</em>) The first is the baroque love songs including <em>Anyone Who Had A Heart</em>, <em>A House Is Not A Home</em>, <em>Walk On By</em>, <em>Promises, Promises</em> and <em>This Guy’s In Love With You</em>.</p>
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<p>In this group Bacharach always lets the melody dictate the tempo and this lends many of the songs a volatile irregularity. He said in 1970: “What I hear is pure melody. No beat. I never write at the piano. I never even orchestrate at the piano except to check.” He also admits, despite his technical skill as an arranger, that he worked out the time signatures only after he had composed the bulk of the tune. In <em>Anyone Who Had A Heart</em> the tempo moves back and forth from 5/4 to 4/4 at the behest of the melody. It even switches to 7/8 to create the sense that the climactic exhortation – “take me in his arms and always love me, why won’t you?” – is tripping over itself with desperation. With Bacharach the tune is always suggesting meanings of its own, increasing its potency and ability to steer the subconscious.</p>
<p>There are similar twists and turns in <em>A House Is Not A Home</em>. This time the lyrics are those of an English ballad (including internal rhyme) – “when I climb the stairs and turn the key, oh please be there still in love with me”– and they could have been written by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Marvell or Betjeman.</p>
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<p>Musically – again, here is where you almost resent him for leading you on – <em>A House Is Not A Home</em> is drenched in seventh chords, particularly major sevenths, which as even the most cockamamie songwriter will tell you is like pouring sugar on to the keyboard. Major sevenths are the musical fast lane to romantic affectation. So there is the suspicion that Bacharach is using a cheap trick, except, as ever with him, his tricks are more original than most. The switches from minor to major sevenths are signals of emotional change, in the most obvious case the incredible third section that rises suddenly with the word “suddenly”. As it fades out, <em>A House Is Not A Home</em> feels more vital, more robust – less sentimental – than when it began.</p>
<p><em>Promises, Promises</em> (the title song from the musical adaptation of <em>The Apartment</em>) is an ingenious union of theme, phrasing and score. Here the conviction of the narrator to make a new start is captured in Bacharach’s most complex song. Shifting metres, huge leaps of pitch (mortals should not apply to sing it), brutal accenting and vocal gear changes reflect not only a character yearning for freedom, but the exact moment when she makes her break: a moment of wild and understandably confused excitement.</p>
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<p>The singer begins <em>Promises, Promises</em> on percussive eighth notes in 3/4-time then in a single phrase changes to quarter notes in 4/4, then quarter notes in 3/4. And that is just the first verse, except that it can hardly be called a verse since the structure is so odd and the melody so seemingly out of touch with the tempo that is creates a syncopation that feels like riding a pogo stick on a tightrope. Similarly, in the bridge that builds to the climactic line and ends on the wildly sustained “yes, love”, the singer must skip through three bars that switch from 3/4 to 4/4 to 6/4. Bacharach is as demanding on the singer as he is generous to the listener.</p>
<p>The second category of songs is the understated, melancholic sketches, including <em>Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head</em>, <em>Do You Know The Way To San Jose?</em>,<em> Message to Michael</em>, <em>One Less Bell To Answer</em> as well as the impersonal – almost political – <em>What The World Needs Now</em> and <em>The Windows Of The World</em>, in which the lyrics pull Bacharach’s lush chords in an unexpectedly civic direction.</p>
<p><em>Do You Know The Way To San Jose?</em> and <em>Message To Michael</em> have more in common with the down-at-heel dramas of Ray Davies than the construction-line compositions with which Bacharach is often associated. The Kinks’ sentimentality is rightly lauded as sincere and witty and many of David’s lyrics convey no less subtle a sensibility – “He sings each night in some café/In his quest to find wealth and fame, I hear Michael has gone and changed his name”. The despondency is heightened not by an obviously “sad” arrangement, but by juxtaposing it with latin rhythms (Bacharach favoured Mexican and Brazilian styles, particularly bossa nova). The percussion shuffles along, often out of step with the phrasing, creating an eerie sense of emptiness.</p>
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<p>These songs are a clear rebuttal of the prejudice against Bacharach. They express feelings of resignation and regret – even underwhelming failure. They are not factitious and do not demand a cod emotional response; they are truly songs of experience. As for his personal commitment to his art it would be best to let him explain: “I’ve got to get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee and write music. Or improvise, or make contact. Touch music, touch it.”</p>
<p>The lyric Bacharach always speaks of as his favourite is <em>Alfie</em>, a song that encapsulates all the varieties and tangents of his and David’s art. It is personal yet public; it revolves around ideas of romance, identity and possibly the deepest expression of philosophical ambiguity in pop music. <em>Alfie</em> begins with a list of rhetorical questions to draw you in, mirrored by a corresponding series of sevenths and ninth chords, many of which contain an extra minor note to emphasise the yearning quality. As with <em>A House Is Not A Home</em>, the song explodes after a tentative opening, moving upwards and upwards before falling away again to an uncertain murmur. The final run of chords drifts away from the unresolved sound of a diminished E, leaving an invitation to continue wondering.</p>
<p>Years after the dissolution of his partnership with David (the death knell being the distressing failure of the musical remake of <em>Lost Horizon</em> in 1973) Bacharach won a third Oscar for <em>Arthur’s Theme</em> in 1982. This was a belated coda to his golden years, though the lyrics by his third wife, Carol Bayer Sager, and the production values of that particular era create an admittedly dated sound. Underneath the schmaltz Bacharach composed a song about the joy of falling in love and made it sound like a disaster waiting to happen. Even the opening run around a D minor is reminiscent of a Jewish folk lament. If it is sentimental, it is a very odd kind.</p>
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<p>One of the other reasons for the songs’ safe passage through the crashing rocks of sentimentality is their brevity. Unlike a mawkish novel or painting, a three-minute tune, however sophisticated, does not have time to develop into a smothering mass of fraudulent pathos. Their immediacy is, in part, their salvation.</p>
<p>Ultimately, what the music and lyrics convey is not teenage emotion – infatuation or solipsistic longing – but something entirely adult. And with maturity those emotions become deeper but more brittle. They become desperation, disappointment and the quiet white noise of melancholy. They become unavoidably real. That is no mean feat – just ask Schubert, Porter or Simon. These songs are accessible and profitable, yet esoteric and at times almost gnomic – an unresolved puzzle.</p>
<p>So don’t be too hard on yourself if you have a little cry to <em>Alfie</em> or <em>A House Is Not A Home</em>. It doesn’t necessarily mean you are sentimentalist, but it does mean you are alive.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 05 Jun 2013 08:00:00 +0000George Chesterton195488 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/cultural-capital/2013/04/pictorial-shakespeare-our-time
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In praise of Akira Kurosawa&#039;s Seven Samurai.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2013/51655326.jpg?itok=QfO7unhg" width="510" height="348" alt="Seven Samurai" title="Seven Samurai" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">A scene from Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai (Photo: Getty Images)</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Sixty years ago, deep in the forests of the Izu peninsula about 75 miles from Tokyo, a film crew toiled on a purpose-built, full-scale replica of a 16th-century village. Among them was the man they nicknamed <em>Tenno</em> or “emperor”, Akira Kurosawa. The director was engaged in a year-long struggle with Toho Studios, the cast, crew and the elements. His budget grew to $500,000 (the highest ever in Japan at the time) and production was stopped twice, at which points Kurosawa went fishing until the studio came round to his way of thinking. At the end of the freezing, rain-sodden climactic shoot – torture for the actors involved – he possessed the rough material for <em>Seven Samurai</em>, one of the great hymns to the weaknesses and wonders of humanity.</p>
<p><em>Seven Samurai</em> is hardly underrated. It’s always popping up in lists of the best films of all time. It is technically ingenious, a narrative tour de force and surprisingly funny (the leitmotif-heavy score also deserves more recognition). But it is most often referred to as an action movie template. Its legacy is the team-building adventure, notably copied in <em>The Magnificent Seven</em> (1960) and children’s animation <em>A Bug's Life</em> (1998) and used as a rough guide for a host of films from <em>The Dirty Dozen</em> (1967) to <em>Avengers Assemble</em> (2012).</p>
<p>I don’t remember what I felt the first time I watched <em>Seven Samurai</em>. But I remember the second time. It was as if I was peering through the layers of a moving palimpsest and behind each flashing sword, stirring speech or moment of slapstick there was another entirely different film. What that other film was about, I slowly but surely noted, was love.</p>
<p>The many loves of <em>Seven Samurai</em> roam like the great animals of the plains in relationships that shape and are shaped by their habitat. Kurosawa maps out human love just as the leader of the samurai, Kambei, maps out the village he has pledged to defend.</p>
<p>The plot is rudimentary. Rikichi, a farmer in rigidly feudal Japan, overhears bandits planning to attack his village after the harvest. He convinces the other farmers to let him employ masterless samurai to defend them (with food as payment). He then meets the ageing warrior Kambei, who agrees to help. They return to the village, prepare for battle then engage the bandits over several days of fighting.</p>
<p>Rikichi is the <em>primum mobile</em>, so it is fitting that love is his motivation. He carries a deep wound, revealed to be the kidnapping and enslavement of his wife by the bandits, and yet his generosity (such as when he gives his house over to samurai) provides vital momentum. Without his bravery, born from a yearning for dignity for himself and his community – and love for his wife – there would be no <em>Seven Samurai</em>.</p>
<p>In a nearby town, Rikichi and his companions witness an act of sacrifice that symbolises, in microcosm, what they are searching for. Kambei rescues a child from a kidnapper but his disguise requires the cutting of his samurai top-knot and therefore a loss of social prestige. His subsequent decision to help the farmers seems guided by the ghosts of war, as if his old limbs must keep stretching into the material world, seeking acts of penance for the horrors he has witnessed and no doubt inflicted. He accepts his poverty with a submissive rub of his head, liberated by the abandonment of hope. In Kambei (acted with moving nuance by Takashi Shimura, who had given the performance of his life as a dying bureaucrat in Kurosawa’s previous film <em>Ikiru </em>[1952]) <em>Seven Samurai </em>exhibits its purest love. Kambei may still need to eat and sleep, but he has become a societal nobody, pushing him towards a negation of the self that has a nourishing effect on everyone else.</p>
<p>Kambei also catches the eye of Katsushiro, a doting adolescent who begs him to take him on as a pupil. Kambei reluctantly agrees to let him assist the recruitment and from here three more down-on-their-luck samurai, Gorobei, Shichiroji and Heihachi, join the group.</p>
<p>Back at the village, Kurosawa exposes the problematic love of a parent for a child nearing adulthood. The farmer Manzo has from the start warned of the menace posed by nesting samurai to the village’s women and young girls. We now see he was thinking of his daughter, Shino. The scene where he forcibly cuts off Shino’s hair is laden with oppressive and possessive love. It is a tarnished emotion, but adds to the breadth of Kurosawa’s canvas.</p>
<p>From the moment the samurai arrive – reinforced by the master swordsman Kyuzo (another object of hero-worship for the impressionable Katsushiro) and the surly and clearly fraudulent Kikuchiyo – the two castes begin to grind against each other. But amid the threat of oblivion, those clashes become embraces and distrust turns into revivifying love.</p>
<p>Romance elbows its way in too: Katsushiro’s infatuation for Shino is born as he daydreams in the woods. He complains that if Shino is a boy, as she claims, she should be training with the others, not picking flowers, before looking down at the flowers he has himself picked during a teenage haze. Kurosawa's point is that first love has a particular knuckleheaded beauty that even war cannot bend. Their subsequent meetings not only allow their innocent romance to grow, but also encourage empathy for those suffering around them.</p>
<p>When the samurai learn from Katsushiro of a starving old woman whose family were murdered by bandits, they give her their food, while Heihachi offers comfort even as she professes her desire to die. Love, as the samurai witness and then experience, alters their behaviour. Another marker of their transformation from rolling stones to social dependents is their affection for the village children, who they entertain and feed amid the anxious waiting. Collective effort and shared responsibility flower with the harvest and as the samurai and farmers become bound by new ties of warmth and respect it is hard not to read a wider political message in this emotional evolution. As Kambei says to the farmers: “If you defend for all, each individual will be protected. He who thinks only of himself destroys himself.”</p>
<p>Before the onset of the fighting Heihachi makes a banner with symbols for the samurai and the farmers, a mark of solidarity that flies proudly until their bittersweet triumph. It is infinitely more than a representation of martial brotherhood. Judged by the conduct and sacrifice of its jovial creator, it represents everything being discussed here – the multitudinous loves of disparate and desperate people.</p>
<p>If Kambei represents the selfless, then his foil, Kikuchiyo (played by Kurosawa’s muse Toshiro Mifune) stands for something selfish, though more recognisably human. Kikuchiyo sulks, mocks and disobeys but his sense of personal desperation is thinly disguised.</p>
<p>The most magnificent scene in the film is when Kikuchiyo produces a huge cache of armour, swords and spears, previously hidden by the peasants, in a bid to impress the other six warriors. The disgusted samurai quickly realise the only way the villagers could have come by these weapons is by killing and looting other samurai, but their opprobrium prompts Kikuchiyo into one of the great cinematic speeches, with Mifune at his most brooding and animalistic.</p>
<p>He speaks directly to the camera (ie at us) in a tirade against the peasants for their conduct. “What did you take farmers for? Saints? They are the most cunning, untrustworthy animals.” This switches suddenly into a confession of his hatred for the samurai, blaming their wickedness for the villagers’ behaviour. “Who made animals of them? You did.” The samurai are, he suggests, little better than bandits themselves. This hard truth is digested in shameful silence, broken, fittingly, by Kambei with tears in his eyes.</p>
<p>“You are a farmer’s son, aren’t you?”</p>
<p>It is a moment of great unburdening and the love it forges makes victory over the bandits possible. It is also the moment of enlightenment for the audience and draws out our affection for the characters. The sound of a stream rolling on and on is heard throughout Kikuchiyo’s unravelling and the stretched seconds of calm that follow. It is an exquisite experience for the viewer.</p>
<p>If <em>Seven Samurai</em> has “a weakness” it is probably related to the single biggest criticism of all Kurosawa’s work, namely the perceived shallowness of his female characters. This is usually accompanied by a comparison with his near contemporary Kenji Mizoguchi, whose mothers and wives, often in historical dramas, carry the emotional and dramatic burden of their films. However, amid all the existential masculinity the two most important women, one half-drawn (Shino), one little more than symbolic (Rikichi’s wife) – do at least offer some acknowledgment of women’s suffering, particularly their abuse at the hands of men across all society.</p>
<p>Even the final battles evince the transformative effects of love. Kikuchiyo’s journey back to his roots started with contempt for the farmers, which of course, since he is a farmer, is self-loathing, but ends in love and sacrifice. The more he “becomes” a samurai the closer he gets to the peasants and, ultimately, his true self. When he rescues a baby from a burning watermill he holds the child and screams: “This baby. It’s me. This is what happened to me!” From this moment he is one of the seven, but he has been an orphaned farmer all his life.</p>
<p>The focus of his contempt throughout is the pathetic Yohei (think Private Godfrey from <em>Dad’s Army</em>) so the fact that Yohei’s death is the cause of Kikuchiyo’s greatest pang of love and subsequent valorous apotheosis is a poetic masterstroke by Kurosawa. The man who, for Kikuchiyo, embodied everything that was miserable and wretched about the peasants was the man he most wanted to protect. From here his love becomes a thirst for reckoning.</p>
<p>As the battle fades only three remain: Katsushiro, trembling with terror and impotent rage, Kambei and his old friend Shichiroji. After the funerals the farmers sing as they reconvene a more familiar fight with nature in the paddy fields. Katsushiro’s love for Shino is so strong he stays in the village, effectively renouncing Kambei, who offers the famous final lines: “We’ve lost again. The farmers are the winners. Not us.” His exit is overwhelmed by the joyous chorus of the peasants – back down on their knees in the dirt.</p>
<p>Steven Spielberg called Kurosawa “the pictorial Shakespeare of our time” and the comparison is not a frivolous one. As with <em>Antony And Cleopatra</em> and <em>King Lear</em>, at his best Kurosawa entwines politics with the intimate and philosophical like so many möbius strips. We know Kurosawa felt a kinship with Shakespeare through his interpretations of <em>Macbeth</em> (<em>Throne Of Blood</em>, 1957) and <em>Lear</em> (<em>Ran</em>, 1985), but the closest he came to matching the range and humanity of his hero was in his co-written screenplay for <em>Seven Samurai</em>. And like Shakespeare, however distant and alien the characters and setting appear at first, their transposition in the minds of the audience to whatever the “present day” may be confronts us with the alarmingly familiar: ourselves in the mirror. The critic Donald Richie said of the historical setting: “Kurosawa can go beyond reality and try to find out what is there.”</p>
<p>Kurosawa’s achievement is that the effect of these expressions, this compassion, is cumulative. In a world of violence, division, insecurity and injustice, love pervades, even if it does not always prevail. Kambei leaves unloved, but his purpose was to make a sacrifice that meant everything to the communal farmers, however meaningless in the world of an itinerant loner. Only his selflessness can sustain him at the end of this drama. Like the replenished rice in the flooded fields, life goes on. Love goes on. <em>Seven Samurai</em> is a lyrical, visceral song to that inalienable fact.</p>
<p>Twitter: @geochesterton </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:00:28 +0000George Chesterton194365 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/culture/2012/10/praise-clavinet
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>It&#039;s 40 years since Stevie Wonder showed off the otherwordly range of this keyboard.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2012/3274618.jpg?itok=RZhQm5Uk" width="510" height="348" alt="Stevie Wonder" title="Stevie Wonder" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Stevie Wonder performing in October 1975 (Photograph: Getty Images)</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>If you listen very closely to "Sweet Little Girl" from Stevie Wonder’s <em>Music of My Mind</em> album you can hear him mumble: “You know your baby loves you more than I love my clavinet”. It is certainly a song full of self-parody, but this is no mere joke because for him it was the ultimate compliment. The clavinet was the instrument that defined him and it was also, though few people recognise it, the instrument of a decade.</p>
<p>The notes made by this unobtrusive little rectangle sparkle through the 1970s like space dust falling on the disparate worlds of a musical galaxy. And 2012 is a double anniversary for the clavinet: 30 years since the German company Hohner ceased production and 40 years this month since the release of Wonder's "Superstition" in the US, the song for which it is best known and on which it was stretched to its fullest and most glorious extent.</p>
<p> From funk, soul, fusion and reggae and then to country rock, hard rock, disco and west coast AOR, this sonic will-o’-the wisp seemed somehow suited to whatever purpose it was applied. Originally created for classical music in European homes, the clicking, clucking, quacking noises it produced went on to make funk funkier, soul more soulful and rock darker and more decadent. But when the decade ended it too disappeared, superseded by new keyboards beside which it suddenly seemed tired and obsolete.</p>
<p> Before peering deeper into "Superstition" it’s worth looking at how the clavinet came to be made and how it generated such a unique sound. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Hohner – best known for harmonicas – had been experimenting with portable versions of familiar keyboard types. They produced the cimbalet, inspired by the harpsichord, in which strings are plucked, and various models of pianet, in which the keys activated a sticky pad that on release would vibrate a reed. In 1964 the first clavinet was produced, based on the venerable clavichord, an instrument with a 400-year pedigree that used blades called “tangents” to strike the strings. Clavichords were impractically quiet and a clavinet got round this by replacing the tangents with hammers that plunged down on to a string when a key was depressed. That string was pressed into a metal strip, or “anvil”, which made the string vibrate. The vibration reached magnetic pickups for a sound that could be fully amplified.</p>
<p> Not only did it produce a magical percussive twang across five octaves of 60 keys, but it was also dynamic, meaning notes could be sustained and pressed with lesser or greater force to vary volume and attack. The high notes were bright, the middle range punchy yet mellow and low notes had a visceral growl. Following a few false starts Hohner made the clavinet C in 1968, the keyboard Wonder used during his golden years. After a left turn with the L - triangular with reverse-colour keys and now as rare as a mountain leopard - in 1971 they introduced the more durable D6, the keyboard hundreds of bands relied on for the next 10 years.</p>
<p> Of course, most people recognise the clavinet best in the hands of one man and in the opening bars of one song. For Wonder it became not merely an accompaniment, but his second voice. In a most basic sense it meant he could play his own version of lead and rhythm guitars through a keyboard, but it developed into something much greater, allowing him to express his vision and emotions on a canvass painted from a palette all his own.</p>
<p> His clavinet first shows up, tellingly, as he began to grow as an artist of independent means through songs such as "I Don’t Know Why I Love You" and "You Met Your Match" in 1968 then again on his album of creative transition, 1971’s <em>Where I’m Coming From</em>. Another famous early appearance is on the The Band’s "Up On Cripple Creek" in 1969, on which Garth Hudson plays it through a wah-wah pedal and makes it wobble like an electrified Jew’s harp. It was around this time that almost every major funk and soul act caught on to the edge the clavinet gave their sound.</p>
<p> In just a couple of years the Isley Brothers, Parliament/Funkadelic, Bill Withers, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, Earth, Wind &amp; Fire, Billy Preston, The Commodores and countless others worked the clavinet into the fabric of popular music while in the more esoteric world of fusion it became a natural staple of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.</p>
<p> The throaty pulse of the clavinet also reached Jamaica where it emerged on reggae. Bob Marley exploited both the higher and lower range to great effect, from his mainstream breakthrough on the <em>Catch A Fire</em> album in 1973 (played by the American sesssionman John “Rabbit” Bundrick) through to near the end of his life on 1980’s "Could You Be Loved".</p>
<p> Wonder was busy throughout the period creating his own distinct song cycle, leaning heavily on the clavinet and moog synthesisers, and much of the unity of his output is down to his innovative and technically minded producers, Malcolm Cecil and Bob Margouleff. The second album in his run of five consecutive masterpieces, <em>Talking Book</em>, is dripping with the sound of multiple clavinets – sometimes honeyed and at others venomous and mean.</p>
<p> Bands often talk about being “tight” and this is a concept that involves a lot more than technical ability. It requires an unfakeable simpatico. Wonder achieves a kind of other-worldly tightness on "Superstition" – at the age of 22 - by being in synch with himself. The syncopation of his percussive style of keyboard playing is so idiosyncratic that the only way for this track to work is for one person to play it all, including the drums. This is taken to a state of incandescent – almost absurd – virtuosity through the use of eight clavinet tracks in the recording. In a mix of 16 tracks, half were clavinet; the others being one for moog bass, three for the drums, two for his incredible vocals and two for horns (the only thing he did not play).</p>
<p> Syncopation – playing off the expected beat and putting stress on notes outside regular timing – is one of the keys to funk and to "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDZFf0pm0SE">Superstitio</a>n". First you hear the shuffling drums and as a typical Motown drummer he makes them sound like a piano hitting the pavement from a 10th-storey window. Next comes the opening clavinet riff, which many people still assume is a guitar. On paper it is a relatively simple pentatonic run (black keys, basically) starting on E-flat around which is added layer after layer of the same keyboard, some doubling up and some syncopated slightly differently to the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WryUOXo9sfM">original</a>). What makes the riffs sound so unusual are the extra touches Wonder makes around the core notes, sometimes called “ghost notes”. Cecil and Margouleff then add delay to two tracks to extend what you hear into a vast harmonic panorama. If grooves were deities, "Superstition"’s would be Zeus.</p>
<p> It is a tribute to the song that the clavinet became a shorthand for funk. Even the Goodies' 1975 novelty hit, "Funky Gibbon", predicated its “funkiness” entirely around a clavinet riff. But while the use of the keyboard was reaching a peak in quantity and quality a subtle contextual shift occurred. As it became synonymous with contemporary black music so, inevitably, a divergent number of white rock acts began to spread - and possibly dilute - its impact and whereas in funk it complemented the generally positive and uplifting feel, in rock it suggested something very different.</p>
<p> In the hands of rock bands it became the background noise to babylonian hedonism. It carries with it, even today, the implied grime, crime and menace of a decade and a culture in conflict. It conveys uncertainty and seediness - anxiety instead of optimism. The first instance of this I can discern is on The Rolling Stones’ 1973 album, <em>Goats Head Soup</em>, especially in the song "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)", which recounts police and criminal violence. Roxy Music’s "Casanova" in 1974 and Steely Dan’s "Kid Charlemagne" from 1976 – arguably the slinkiest record ever made – lay before us a noir-ish picture of nihilism, drugs and charlatans. In the hands of the sardonic Steely Dan the bass notes crackle like a brushfire in the night on the Californian hills.</p>
<p> Other big beasts of the 1970s, including Led Zeppelin ("Trampled Under Foot" and "Custard Pie"), Pink Floyd ("Have A Cigar"), The Eagles ("Life In The Fast Lane") and Fleetwood Mac ("You Make Loving Fun") all used the clavinet in a way that evokes not funky exhilaration, but their own destructive excesses. Even David Bowie used it to add a soiled warmth to the languid soul of several tracks on <em>Young Americans</em>. Although still in use through the high watermark of disco it was beginning to feel dated despite Hohner's new models in 1977 and 1978.</p>
<p> In this way the instrument made a journey of its own through the years from novelty, then to joy and energy and ending in a slightly tawdry darkness. Fashion killed the clavinet and production was halted in 1982. Its successor as the defining sound of a generation was the first digital sampler and sequencer, the Fairlight, which, as if to prove a point, was sounding decidedly old hat by the late 1980s (Wonder himself was one of their first clients). You occasionally still hear the clavinet but it is always as if from a different country. If you want to play one now there is a decent sample to be found in every modern electric keyboard (the real ones sell for between £3,000-6,000). But to be sure of complete satisfaction you are better off reaching for track six of <em>Talking Book</em> and letting Stevie get to work.</p>
<p> <em>Twitter @geochesterton</em></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 05 Oct 2012 09:58:03 +0000George Chesterton189598 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/why-george-osborne-now-looks-irretrievably-damaged
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The Chancellor is a politician unable to conceal his lack of control.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2012/1449980692.jpg?itok=96AlHI-W" width="510" height="348" alt="George Osborne now looks like a politician unable to conceal his lack of control" title="George Osborne now looks like a politician unable to conceal his lack of control" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">George Osborne now looks like a politician unable to conceal his lack of control. Photograph: Getty Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Whether it is attacking Britain’s “lazy” workers, blaming the double-dip recession on the rain or taking credit for Olympic gold medals, the Conservative Party appears to have lost any understanding how it is perceived or how to get its message across. Increasingly, it feels as if one man is the primary source of this slide.</p>
<p>George Osborne looks irretrievably damaged: caught between two jobs, Chancellor in the government, strategist for his party, and seemingly incapable of success in either. Aside from his destructive economic principles, his personal involvement in Tory spin has made him the most electorally unappealing politician of recent times.</p>
<p>The former chief whip Lord Ryder recently said of Osborne: “He isn’t a strategist at all; he is a tactician.” But if that is true – and it feels as though it is – tactics don’t seem to be his strong point either. There is now a chasm between a chaotic do-nothing ideology and the language used to promote the illusion of the exact opposite. In April David Cameron spoke of “redoubling his efforts” and “straining every sinew”. Such meaningless guff is designed specifically to mask the reality of economic libertarianism – doing nothing. In May Osborne said he was going to “concentrate” on the economy. In effect the party strategist admitted that those responsibilities meant he had taken his eye off the nation’s most pressing issue. Last month he trumped this by saying – presumably with a misguided eye on football populism – he was focused “110 per cent” on the economy. So the Chancellor also admitted he is not good with figures.</p>
<p>Then a week later Osborne managed to combine these two excruciating expressions, an occurrence so infuriating a super villain would have trouble repressing the urge to destroy planet earth after hearing it. “I think the government now has its opportunity to give its 110 per cent attention, effort and energy to getting the economy moving,” he said, undermining his own credibility in both roles. That Tory spin and strategy appears to be in such a mess was confirmed by reports that Osborne has been taken off duty for the next general election campaign.</p>
<p>This kind of panicky muddle is usually associated with the dog days of a second-term government. There is nothing positive to say other than “we are working hard”. This might wash with core Conservatives, but the drip-drip of disingenuous soundbites and aggressive, accusatory politics such as backbench MPs calling British workers “idlers” who need to be more like their Chinese counterparts will not work on undecided or swing voters and compounds every publicly held prejudice about the leading figures of the party.</p>
<p>Osborne’s relationship with Cameron has two things in common with that of Mycroft Holmes to his younger brother, Sherlock. The first is that like Mycroft, Osborne is rumoured to be the more intelligent. The other is that while Sherlock made the headlines it is said Mycroft merely worked for the government or at times “was the government”. Cameron has left the big ideas <em>and</em> the details to someone with a far weaker grasp of the public mood than himself. At his worst Osborne can appear a mixture of Patrick Bateman and a Greyfriars snitch, but he is too knitted in to Cameron’s project to replace so we are facing another three years of this, which is fine for the opposition but not so good for the unemployed, sick or needy.</p>
<p>Each new PR mistake exposes the vapidity of Osborne’s ideology and the government’s actions. It’s telling that the Conservatives somehow contrived to miss out on Olympic piggyback riding as their relationship to the Games began to look more and more like that of Cynthia Lennon’s to the Beatles train to Bangor in 1967.</p>
<p>During the Olympics the public made a connection between the joy and communion they experienced (or at least felt vicariously) and the values extolled throughout the Games on the ground, namely generosity of spirit, social co-operation and inclusiveness – and they instinctively knew that these have little to do with Osborne or his policies. Ironically the public came to associate these anti-Tory values with patriotism, the natural territory of his party. It’s as if the “spirit’ of the Games, however illusory, was felt to be the opposite of the spirit of the government.</p>
<p>The effect of this hugely significant public revelation is that Conservative attempts to claw back some initiative – such as linking the success of British athletes with Tory theories of competition – are doomed to failure. They are always out of synch.</p>
<p>The most instructive gaffe was to green-light the accusation by David Gauke MP – a treasury minister – that cash-in-hand payments were “morally wrong”. The idea that this cosmically hypocritical notion would play well in the context of the “out-of-touch posh boys” label is baffling (and shows how much the party misses Andy Coulson). But it all seems to be part of Osborne’s scheme for deflecting attention away from his responsibility for bad economic news. As well as attacking Labour, he has blamed the faltering finances on the weather, the Royal Wedding and plumbers. Somehow he thought it would be a good idea to alienate the self-employed – it’s not like they ever vote Tory is it?</p>
<p>When Osborne steps into the public arena directly the results can be disastrous, such as his self-generated and face-losing row with Ed Balls. The lip-curling (literally) resentment as he backed away from Balls’ counterpunch exposed a politician unable to hide his lack of control.</p>
<p>It is tough – and depressing – to decide which is more alienating: that the Chancellor of the Exchequer uses then re-uses a soundbite of innumerate nonsense or that he thinks some voters – any voters – are dumb enough to be inured to his failings through the use of a sporting cliché. Either way, it’s bad news for him, but even worse for the rest of us.</p>
<p> </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:17:39 +0000George Chesterton188471 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2012/06/rescuing-writers-mid-list
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Fiction Uncovered gives eight novelists the recognition they deserve.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2012/fiction_uncovered.jpg?itok=7OWXsPr_" width="510" height="348" alt="Fiction Uncovered" title="Fiction Uncovered" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The eight nominated authors for Fiction Uncovered 2012 (Photo: Alicia Canter)</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>For reasons not entirely clear to me the act of reading novels had been chiselled down to two mutually exclusive disciplines. The first was digesting great and difficult works of the past as an act of compulsion; I wanted to know what secrets they might reveal. The second was a brief and largely unpleasant exposure to popular fiction – all short sentences, bad dialogue and cheap thrills. But reading the novels named as winners of the <a href="http://www.fictionuncovered.co.uk/">Fiction Uncovered</a> literary award led me down a path of fresh and unexpected pleasures. I found I could have my cake and eat it too.</p>
<p> A precarious business, being a novelist of certain type. There are writers out there who have achieved substantial critical success and enjoy a career many others would envy, yet have somehow evaded the wider public consciousness. The industry whispers it as “mid-list”, a term that refers not to genre, subject or form, but to a habitat where their achievements do not even make them particularly famous in the literary world, let alone in mainstream cultural life. This is the landscape of Fiction Uncovered, which nominates eight books for the greater recognition they deserve.</p>
<p> The award is in its second year and with a panel of judges chaired by John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL, has again selected titles that not only sing of their own merits, but serve as reminders – as they did to me – of the value of reading intelligent artful books for pleasure.</p>
<p> Genre publishers can build intimate and lucrative relationships with fans by reaching out to long-standing communities of loyal readers. That’s not so easy with literary or “quality” fiction – the readers of which are an altogether a more disparate bunch. The decline of bookshops also means there is a need to reconnect those in search of this kind of experience with a range of fresh titles. You could say the award is a highfalutin' book club, as the writer of <em>Lucky Bunny</em>, one of the winners, explains. “The tough thing is to attract and keep readers,” says Jill Dawson. “I don’t obsess about sales but I do obsess over readers. It can be hard to get noticed and a project such as this is very much needed. It can introduce books about which people may have misconceptions or preconceptions and they might be pleasantly surprised.”</p>
<p> <em>Lucky Bunny </em>is one such pleasant surprise. It is the story of a criminally inclined Queenie Dove, who narrates her own rises and falls through the Blitz and postwar London. This could seem like over-familiar territory, but Dawson skillfully avoids the cockney tropes that might have dragged it down. The young Queenie is the victim, and cause, of a series of workaday tragedies and the energy of her tale lies in its dynamic shifts from exhilarated escapade to domestic horror.</p>
<p> “The introduction of Mum’s name into the air feels wobbly, like the flame on a birthday candle. I daren’t even answer, in case my breath blows it out.”</p>
<p> Queenie’s voice feels authentic but also sparkles with burnished rhetoric and although the convincing historical scaffolding is impressive, Dawson has achieved something more than an engaging period piece. Queenie has a brain and heart through which we can explore profound questions about how environment, family and circumstance can shape the psychology – and therefore destiny – of an individual.</p>
<p> <em>My Former Heart</em> by Cressida Connolly covers a similar historical period as <em>Lucky Bunny </em>but follows the lives of three generations of middle-class women who find, in their own distinct ways, a second version of love. Unlike the eviscerating candour of its fellow winner this is gentler in tone, though that does not mean it sacrifices any emotional honesty. It has a mesmeric quality as each character is swept along and every drama, every “event”, is not a point of punctuation but a ripple, merely following the last and preceding the next.</p>
<p> Another outstanding winner is <em>Two Cows And A Vanful Of Smoke</em> by Peter Benson, a well established novelist who knows the value of Fiction Uncovered to his work and the industry. “One of the great things about it is that it’s not a competition – it’s a celebration,” says Benson. “The literary world is no different to any other - the news tends to be dominated by money, scandal, personal spats and hype - and sometimes it’s easy to forget what lies at the heart of what we do. Good books. Fiction Uncovered recognises this.”</p>
<p> <em>Two Cows</em> mixes Somerset drifters, corrupt police and stolen cannabis, but the real magic – literally – of the book is in its evocation of a mystical English countryside. As Elliot tries to extricate himself from the tangle of stupid friends, gangsters and angry farmers, the land itself speaks on every page. Elliot (learning from his domestic mystical mum) reads messages in the flights of buzzards and the eyes of forest animals while the trees warn of danger. The prose twists and rolls like a vine creeping over a medieval brick wall.</p>
<p> “I was angry now, angry and fierce, like a fish with a hook in its eye. A bush on fire. The bird with a vole in its beak … I crossed roads without looking, barged past old women with shopping trolleys, kicked at stones I saw I the gutter. Panic, fear, trouble – they’d all gone.”</p>
<p> <em>This Is Life</em> by Dan Rhodes and <em>The Light Of Amsterdam</em> by David Park both send an ensemble in search of some new purpose in the panorama of a European city. <em>This is Life</em> flirts with magical realism in Paris and walks on a precarious ridge of whimsy – that it manages to avoid the dangers of this high-wire act shows the author’s skill. The characters skip around a world where love at first sight is as much part of their daily routine as the morning espresso. It is a butterfly of a book and one that desperately wants to be, and probably should be, a film.</p>
<p> <em>The Light Of Amsterdam</em> is thicket-dense with the interior workings of characters on the brink of discovery and/or breakdown. The names of the three main travellers from Belfast to the Dutch city, Alan, Karen and Marion, sound like old testament siblings, tormented by fate and tested by God. It is three worlds of intense solipsism, though the occasionally overbearing narration is tempered with empathy for the hurt that the little things in life can inflict and for how those little things, if left unattended, can grow in silence and darkness into monsters. No matter how frustrating Karen’s psychological pecking seems, the news her daughter reveals in Amsterdam is a moment that lingers in the memory. Both titles survive and thrive through the episodic switch from one character to another, which prevents <em>This Is Life</em> from flying away in the breeze and <em>The Light Amsterdam </em>from sinking into quicksand.</p>
<p> Another demonstration of the range of the award is the two titles which come closest to that of genre writing. <em>Hit And Run </em>by Doug Johnstone blends a modern crime thriller set in Edinburgh with a touch of Dostoyevsky, as a reporter falls further and further into a personal Hades of his own making. It’s a book of breakneck pace, even if the hardboiled dialogue sometimes jars with its modern setting. Completely different, though sharing their more specialised status, is Susanna Jones’s <em>When Nights Were Cold</em>. Also a thriller of a kind, it plays with a survivor's unreliable memory of an Edwardian mountaineering expedition that went horribly wrong. The “coldness”, in its many forms, is superbly evoked by Jones and she plays on familiar notions of Suffragettes and imperial adventurers to create an unsettling saga.</p>
<p> Finally, the ambition – and success – of Fiction Uncovered is best illustrated by the title that, at first sight, least deserves to be on the winner’s list. <em>Crushed Mexican Spiders</em> by Tibor Fischer is a tiny volume of only two short stories. <em>Crushed Mexican Spiders</em> itself is a decent mix of Kafka and Lovecraft in modern Brixton in which the villain is the city of London itself, but the other story, <em>Possibly Forty Ships</em>, is quite magnificent.</p>
<p> A man (it’s up the reader to guess who) under threat of torture tells his eyewitness account the Trojan War and his “truth” about Achilles, Odysseus and Helen. Not only does it crackle with playful classical allusions, but its humour – “They marry Menelaus off to a very minor princess so ugly she has to sneak up on a fig tree to pick the fruit” – contains barbs of cynical, word weary wisdom that are both provocative and strangely moving. It has more depth and breadth than many novels 40 times its size. It is also the kind of unexpected thrill that fulfils the promise of this particular award. For me, this really was fiction, uncovered.</p>
<p> <em>Fiction Uncovered FM will run from Foyles Charing Cross Road, London, from 20 – 23 June 2012. The pop-up radio station will be dedicated to celebrating fiction.</em> <em>A full list of the 2012 winners can be found <a href="http://www.fictionuncovered.co.uk/2012list/">here</a>.</em></p>
<p> @geochesterton</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 19 Jun 2012 09:40:48 +0000George Chesterton186806 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/tv-and-radio/2012/05/value-nhs-and-bbc-immeasurable
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Attempts to denigrate these public institutions must be resisted</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2012/136530802.jpg?itok=WzQqbpLw" width="510" height="348" alt="The value of the NHS and the BBC is immeasurable" title="The value of the NHS and the BBC is immeasurable" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">BBC headquarters at Media City UK Photograph: Getty Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>It has never been easy to justify making people pay for something they don't use. That is often how disgruntled Britons now see the NHS and BBC, despite the fact that often those who complain about their high taxes or the licence fee conveniently forget their recent trip to their GP, the maternity ward or the hours they spend enjoying commercial-free TV and radio. But the greatest value of these last major publicly owned institutions is not even quantifiable and it is the consistent failure to make this most difficult of cases for the defence that leaves them so vulnerable.</p>
<p> There is a lot to moan about at the moment. We can gripe about crime and bad schools or the Olympics bringing London to standstill or corrupt and elitist politicians – a dog even won Britain's Got Talent. But there are still a few things that make me relatively pleased to live here. Two things, in fact. The poor raggedy old NHS and the bloated, sometimes crappy but often wonderful BBC. The reasons for lumping these two behemoths together is simple: they both contribute to something well beyond their material value and they are both under dire threat.</p>
<p> Sometimes it seems as if the forces of free-market conservatism are out to get the NHS and BBC precisely because their true worth cannot be expressed on a balance sheet. They are the unfinished business of Thatcherite reform. It's as if it is not just that the government wants to dismantle the NHS for the benefit of profiteering healthcare firms and the BBC for their media-mogul friends, but that it simply can't stand the idea of people contributing to a communal pot for the benefit of everyone. It must really get up the noses of Boris Johnson, who called for a Tory director general this week, and Andrew Lansley, who has fewer friends in public health than the MRSA superbug, to see people “wasting” their money on obscure radio stations and someone else's heart op.</p>
<p> What the NHS and BBC embody and promote is that most slippery and seemingly useless political trope - the public good. This makes it even easier for their opponents. That the mayor of London, not exactly unencumbered by friends in the media, thinks he has the right to meddle in the affairs of the BBC shows the danger it is in. That, after labelling nurses and doctors as communists, the health secretary can this week effectively accuse the Royal College of Nursing of lying over job cuts again demonstrates the way opposition to NHS privitisation is portrayed as wrong economically and ideologically. So in both cases, the fight to save the head and heart of the nation should not only employ facts and figures, but the abstract. Sharing, redistribution, pluralism, protecting the less able and serving the less resourced - these are not worthless because they cannot be rendered statistically. The issue goes far beyond ratings for Eastenders and Radio 3 or cancer recovery rates and waiting times for hip replacements.</p>
<p> It is logical for me to pay for a local radio station that I don't listen to because it serves a community in a way a commercial one never could - or a national network I don't like because it enriches our culture in a way a profit-seeking company would never have the freedom to. I don't need to benefit directly or even “see” the benefit in others, because I am already benefiting by living in a society where such things exist. In the health service the advantages are even more blatant. By contributing to the cost of healthcare for the poorest in society, the wealthiest are helping to reduce suffering in others and by extension for everyone. The social benefits of better universal health, more workers and less crime for example, are obvious, but an explanation involves the kind of conceptual thinking politicians do not trust themselves to present to the public.</p>
<p> The enormous cost of the NHS and the BBC and the way the funds are collected from the public are being used as a hammer to provoke the basest reflexes of self-interest and insularity, Preying on the short-termism and anxiety of recession, the enemies of public ownership are seeking to create an environment in which such ideals are seen as redundant and archaic. It doesn't help that the BBC is guilty of grandiloquent and budget busting projects, yet turns to cutting local and specialist radio – perhaps the greatest expression of its public service – to save money. Despite the faults and weaknesses of both institutions, the forces against them should be resisted. The NHS and BBC, flawed as they are, are not merely worth protecting, they are just about the only two things left that preserve any sense of national community and cohesion.</p>
<p> The mere act of public funding has value. It is not selfless charity or waste; providing our hard-earned wages for something not solely for our own good contributes to our own good because the world we live is a kinder, better, less dumb, less rapacious place for it. In other words, if you think Britain is a divided, violent, parochial and unenlightened country to live in now, without the NHS and the BBC it would be immeasurably worse. There's the rub: the NHS and the BBC make Britain a better place to live - immeasurably.</p>
<p><em>George Chesterton <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/george-chesterton" target="_blank">blogs</a> on politics and culture for the Huffington Post UK</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 16 May 2012 09:55:50 +0000George Chesterton185732 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/05/value-nhs-and-bbc-immeasurable
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Without these organisations, Britain would be more divided, violent and parochial.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><a href="/culture/culture/2012/05/value-nhs-and-bbc-immeasurable"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/136530802.jpg?itok=imk0Qvqq" width="510" height="348" alt="The value of the NHS and the BBC is immeasurable" title="The value of the NHS and the BBC is immeasurable" /></a></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">BBC headquarters at Media City UK Photograph: Getty Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>It has never been easy to justify making people pay for something they don't use. That is often how disgruntled Britons now see the NHS and BBC, despite the fact that often those who complain about their high taxes or the licence fee conveniently forget their recent trip to their GP, the maternity ward or the hours they spend enjoying commercial-free TV and radio. But the greatest value of these last major publicly owned institutions is not even quantifiable and it is the consistent failure to make this most difficult of cases for the defence that leaves them so vulnerable.</p>
<p> There is a lot to moan about at the moment. We can gripe about crime and bad schools or the Olympics bringing London to standstill or corrupt and elitist politicians – a dog even won Britain's Got Talent. But there are still a few things that make me relatively pleased to live here. Two things, in fact. The poor raggedy old NHS and the bloated, sometimes crappy but often wonderful BBC. The reasons for lumping these two behemoths together is simple: they both contribute to something well beyond their material value and they are both under dire threat.</p>
<p> Sometimes it seems as if the forces of free-market conservatism are out to get the NHS and BBC precisely because their true worth cannot be expressed on a balance sheet. They are the unfinished business of Thatcherite reform. It's as if it is not just that the government wants to dismantle the NHS for the benefit of profiteering healthcare firms and the BBC for their media-mogul friends, but that it simply can't stand the idea of people contributing to a communal pot for the benefit of everyone. It must really get up the noses of Boris Johnson, who called for a Tory director general this week, and Andrew Lansley, who has fewer friends in public health than the MRSA superbug, to see people “wasting” their money on obscure radio stations and someone else's heart op.</p>
<p> What the NHS and BBC embody and promote is that most slippery and seemingly useless political trope - the public good. This makes it even easier for their opponents. That the mayor of London, not exactly unencumbered by friends in the media, thinks he has the right to meddle in the affairs of the BBC shows the danger it is in. That, after labelling nurses and doctors as communists, the health secretary can this week effectively accuse the Royal College of Nursing of lying over job cuts again demonstrates the way opposition to NHS privitisation is portrayed as wrong economically and ideologically. So in both cases, the fight to save the head and heart of the nation should not only employ facts and figures, but the abstract. Sharing, redistribution, pluralism, protecting the less able and serving the less resourced - these are not worthless because they cannot be rendered statistically. The issue goes far beyond ratings for Eastenders and Radio 3 or cancer recovery rates and waiting times for hip replacements.</p>
<p> It is logical for me to pay for a local radio station that I don't listen to because it serves a community in a way a commercial one never could - or a national network I don't like because it enriches our culture in a way a profit-seeking company would never have the freedom to. I don't need to benefit directly or even “see” the benefit in others, because I am already benefiting by living in a society where such things exist. In the health service the advantages are even more blatant. By contributing to the cost of healthcare for the poorest in society, the wealthiest are helping to reduce suffering in others and by extension for everyone. The social benefits of better universal health, more workers and less crime for example, are obvious, but an explanation involves the kind of conceptual thinking politicians do not trust themselves to present to the public.</p>
<p> The enormous cost of the NHS and the BBC and the way the funds are collected from the public are being used as a hammer to provoke the basest reflexes of self-interest and insularity, Preying on the short-termism and anxiety of recession, the enemies of public ownership are seeking to create an environment in which such ideals are seen as redundant and archaic. It doesn't help that the BBC is guilty of grandiloquent and budget busting projects, yet turns to cutting local and specialist radio – perhaps the greatest expression of its public service – to save money. Despite the faults and weaknesses of both institutions, the forces against them should be resisted. The NHS and BBC, flawed as they are, are not merely worth protecting, they are just about the only two things left that preserve any sense of national community and cohesion.</p>
<p> The mere act of public funding has value. It is not selfless charity or waste; providing our hard-earned wages for something not solely for our own good contributes to our own good because the world we live is a kinder, better, less dumb, less rapacious place for it. In other words, if you think Britain is a divided, violent, parochial and unenlightened country to live in now, without the NHS and the BBC it would be immeasurably worse. There's the rub: the NHS and the BBC make Britain a better place to live - immeasurably.</p>
<p><em><span style="COLOR: #1f497d">George Chesterton <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/george-chesterton" target="_blank">blogs</a> on politics and culture for the Huffington Post UK </span></em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 16 May 2012 09:51:19 +0000George Chesterton185730 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/voices/2012/04/religion-marginalised-nonsense
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Far from being repressed, expressions of faith and evidence of religious practice and identity are e</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles_2012/141967931.jpg?itok=t99PD3aG" width="510" height="348" alt="New Statesman" title="Young Tottenham fans hold up a banner in support of Fabrice Muamba." /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-nodeimage-title field-type-text field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Young Tottenham fans hold up a banner in support of Fabrice Muamba. Photograph: Getty Images.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">Anyone who believes that religion has been marginalised in Britain should consider the extraordinary events of past few weeks in the Premier League, where two seriously ill footballers elicited a nationwide summons to prayer. However many of the supporters and the wider public actually heeded the calls to pray for Fabrice Muamba and Stilian Petrov, these scenes raise fresh questions about the public face of faith and its relationship with the secular world.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">The emergence of a <em>kulturkampf</em> between a coalition of faith and the forces of so-called militant secularism is a regrettable fabrication. The imagined “threat” of secularism is a phenomenon that can be measured only in the indifference of the non-religious to religion – it is exists only as passivity. Religion, by contrast, is very much active.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">This, in itself, is nothing of note, but vociferous groups and individuals are attempting to create a narrative through which they can portray themselves as victims, turn rights into privileges and create conflict where there was none.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">It may or may not be a coincidence that the return to power of the Conservatives has seen an increase in this rhetoric. Baroness Warsi’s recent trip to the Vatican confirmed that a reactionary alliance was forming against a secularism that was not merely described as militant, but as “intolerant”. Intolerant?</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">This year’s ruling against public prayer as an official element of council meetings in Devon is not intolerance. It is a decision designed to protect those without faith – enforced through the same laws that protect the rights of the religious. Here is the myth of militant secularism, a fantasy to suit the persecution complexes of people who feel out of step with mainstream culture.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">Even if the Tories are (tentatively) pushing a pro-religion stance to shore up voters with conservative social values it has not stopped some in Labour, David Lammy for one, pursuing the same line. What David Cameron thinks about all this is anyone’s guess, though one would suspect any unease he may feel – the campaigning of Nadine Dorries MP may give him sleepless nights – is outweighed by the thought of all those religious voters.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">The disproportionate influence of faith schools, which make up one third of state funded schools in England, is another manifestation of religiosity that makes a mockery of these claims. Faith schools are regularly the best in their area because they are often able to cherry-pick children from better-off families. Hardly the province of the persecuted.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">Although it is virtually impossible to assess the accuracy of Cameron’s proclamation that Britain is a Christian country, the fact the he feels he can say it is evidence that 1) it is at least partly true and 2) this is a country that does not discriminate against Christians.</span><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">Religious people have rights, but a minority confuse those rights with privileges. The irony is that secular laws exist to protect the rights of the religious. Religious laws, where they exist, tend to work in the opposite way. The judge who upheld the complaint of the gay couple who were refused a booking at a Cornwall B&amp;B because of the owners’ religious beliefs put it succinctly. “I do not consider that the appellants face any difficulty in manifesting their religious beliefs. They are merely prohibited from so doing in the commercial context they have chosen.” It is these people’s views that are discriminatory, not the law.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">As well as specific examples of militant faith, a sense that religion is valuable and relevant – in public and in private – is creeping back into national life. Much was made of the positivity and good will of those involved in football after the dramatic and upsetting collapse of Bolton’s Muamba, followed a week later by the news that Aston Villa’s Petrov has leukaemia. The initial shock and sadness over Muamba’s condition was dignified and decent. But in the week that followed, ostentatious public concern – with a conspicuously religious element - became a national obsession.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">There is something novel about so many British people openly accepting that prayer would contribute to the wellbeing of another person. Millions of tweets calling for prayer, thousands of tributes left outside the Reebok Stadium doing the same and days of quasi-obituaries with pictures reflected the latent soft-core religiosity of the public.</span><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">“Pray” is not merely a synonym for “hope he gets better”. If there was any doubt that pray was meant literally the <em>Sun</em> ran the words of Muamba’s fiancee as its splash headline the same week: God is in control.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">Despite its reputation for debauchery, football is chock-full of the faithful – mainly Catholic and charismatic Christians who genuflect and cross themselves on the pitch – and when they urged fans to pray they meant it. The nation’s favourite sport, with its most influential names, became the locus of a mass religious experience.</span></p>
<p style=""><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">What football has shown us is that there is an untapped reservoir of faith envy. It is likely that most of those called to prayer to heal the sick were without faith, and yet they embraced the opportunity like lost pilgrims. It is also likely that the uneasy coalition of prosthelytising Christians and Muslims is aware of this potential.</span></p>
<p><span lang="EN-US" style="" xml:lang="EN-US">If Christians (or Muslims or anyone else) are a minority in modern Britain they should have their rights protected. But hang on - they already do. Plus there are bishops in the Lords, churches in every town and village, priests on Radio 2 and religious iconography everywhere you look. This is not the landscape of a victimised and marginalised sect. There is nothing inherently wrong about the presence of religious expression and thought in public life, </span><font>but after an Easter weekend of watching <em>The King of Kings </em>and <em>The Passion from Port Talbot</em> let us not pretend they are voices crying in the wilderness. </font></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:11:37 +0000George Chesterton184503 at http://www.newstatesman.comhttp://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/03/conservative-critics
<div class="field field-name-field-subheadline field-type-text-long field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Conservative ministers&#039; habit of denouncing critics as lunatic ideologues says more about their own</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-node-image field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-fullnode-image" src="http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/articles/2012/20120303_trots_w.jpg?itok=7g6Wy1Yl" width="510" height="348" alt="" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <!-- Generated by XStandard version 2.0.0.0 on 2012-03-03T09:38:57 --><p>If anything encapsulates just how out of touch those at the top of the Conservative Party are it is their bizarre use of language, in particular the bandying about of "Trotskyite", which this week was once again used indiscriminately in connection with the Workfare scheme. Defaming political enemies is as old as the disreputable business of politics itself, but over the past year or so it has been possible to detect a concerted and probably co-ordinated attempt by the Conservatives to label non-conformists as extremists and ideologues. But it is a tactic built on sand and it has already begun to fail.</p>
<p>Michael Gove was one of the first big hitters to test it out when last month he attacked the opponents of his academy schools programme in Haringey as "Trots". These Trots, i.e. parents, had the temerity to want to stay under the control of the local authority and were branded "bigoted" and "enemies of promise" for their trouble. George Osborne uses the emotive phrase "deficit deniers" to damn opponents of his austerity measures and Baroness Warsi talks of "militant secularism" as if Richard Dawkins has been desecrating cemeteries and setting fire to mosques.</p>
<p>Then Andrew Lansley described his critics as "politicised". The health secretary had the nerve to accuse the vast majority of doctors and nurses in Britain of being against his proposed changes to the NHS solely for political reasons - as if what he wants to do is in no way political. This was the first sign that this idea was about to unravel. Portraying militants as "loony" in the 1980s was relatively easy, because that's exactly how they seemed to the majority of voters. To try something similar now is illogical because when you accuse doctors who earn over £100,000 a year of being "politicised" - and therefore left-wing wreckers - it just sounds ridiculous.</p>
<p>The Conservatives have a fine record of portraying themselves as the party of common sense, as if they are not even involved in "politics" at all. They have also, traditionally, been skilled at defaming their rivals in order to scare floating voters. But that was when the enemies were identifiable as something, or someone, different from the middle-income conservatively minded masses. Now they are using those same labels to discredit pillars of the establishment - the very people those conservative-minded masses respect - and even the previously untouchable nurses are in the firing line. Readers of the Daily Mail are used to believing what the paper reports, but eventually even they will find descriptions of the Royal College of Nursing as a training camp for radical extremists a little odd.</p>
<p>There is no need to be as disingenuous as the right about ideology. Of course many opponents of Conservative policy object as a matter of principle. But there are just as many who point out pitfalls and inconsistencies through practical arguments. The government's case is always that the market - even in the NHS - will drive down costs. Critics can point out the rising price of dentistry, the railways, utility bills . the list goes on and on. They also might suggest that under the private companies set to take over NHS services money will fly out of the country - mainly to the US or through off-shore tax-avoidance schemes - money that in a public organisation would only ever have been redistributed internally. They may be arguments tinged with ideology, but they are also evidence-based. Under the Conservatives we seem to be entering a period where arguments are proffered without recourse to facts, a characteristic already found among the majority of the Republican Party in America (who, of course, have been using the word "liberal" in much the same way as "Trotskyite" for years).</p>
<p>Now we are witnessing the humiliating dismemberment of Workfare. Chris Grayling began by accusing its critics of being "job snobs". This hard-line approach has, predictably, turned out to be folly, because even those who don't think the scheme is a terrible idea for the people who have to endure it can see that it is providing free labour at taxpayers' expense for huge companies that already make billions of pounds in profit. The public know Workfare would drive down wages and undermine employees on just above the minimum wage. The Conservatives would be unwise to alienate these voters - but yet they can't help themselves.</p>
<p>During Prime Ministers' Questions a week ago Priti Patel, the MP for Witham, described those against Workfare as "the militant hard left". The prime minister was suitably encouraging in his response. But again the lesson was not learned. Even as the Workfare ship was foundering Cameron and Grayling again used the "T" word to describe the opponents of a scheme that has managed to embarrass the previously unembarrassable Tesco.</p>
<p>As far as I was aware Marxists have been around for over one hundred years and in that time have never once blocked a Conservative bill - and yet suddenly they have been identified as a credible threat to the government's entire legislative programme and fabric of our society. If the people the Conservatives accused of being Trotskyites - about half the population - actually were, then Gove and his friends would have been put up against a wall and shot long ago and the royal family would be awaiting their fate in "the house of special purpose". Happily that is mere fantasy, but so are the dreams of the Conservative PR men who came up with this silly and counterproductive political tic.</p>
<p>If you are going to insult your critics at least come up with a label people can recognise. Most voters under 40 would not have a clue who Trotsky was or what he stood for, even less understand why the Tories are dredging him out of the A Level history syllabus and using him to stigmatise the BMA and head teachers, those well-known trouble makers and advocates if permanent revolution.</p>
<p>This appropriation of "Trotskyite" can only have come from spin doctors whose sheltered view of society reflects the leadership of the party as a whole. There would almost be something quaint about this tactical balls-up were it not for the insight it gives us to the cynical and disingenuous attitude of the Conservatives towards the public sector and of their barely concealed contempt for anyone who tries to resist the atomisation of society. This lazy use of language has not discredited their critics, but has instead exposed themselves as the real ideologues - the precise opposite of what they hoped to achieve.</p>
</div></div></div>Sat, 03 Mar 2012 09:39:29 +0000George Chesterton183401 at http://www.newstatesman.com